Blog Post

“Museums are places we often go to connect with our pasts. The Cleveland Museum of Art , however, is also giving us a glimpse of the future.”
Lauren Indvik

” The museum recently installed what it claims is the nation’s largest multi-touch screen, where as many as 16 visitors at a time can explore the 3,500 works in the permanent collection on display. Pieces are presented as thumbnails on a 40-foot-wide moving grid. Visitors can click on individual images to pull up more information, and to discover similar items by category (such as African art), artist, medium or period.

The wall, housed in a space called Gallery One, is designed to foster stronger engagement between visitors and individual items in the collection, says Caroline Goeser, director of education and interpretation at the museum. It may introduce a visitor to a work of art for the first time, perhaps in a wing of the museum she had never thought to visit before, or bring about a “deeper encounter” with a work she already knows well.

The wall is designed not just for discovery, but for acting on that discovery. Using the museum’s ArtLens iPad app, visitors can link to the wall to add works to their own custom museum tours. They can also opt into pre-designed, narrated tours developed by the museum’s curators. Additionally, the app’s image-recognition tool allows visitors to scan artworks to pull up more information, save them to their favorites and share their interpretations with friends via social media. Ultimately, it allows for a less linear, more layered and personalized tour through the museum than an audio guide. ” (source: Lauren Indvik on Mashable)